31.5.07

A typographical dilemma:

The title of this blog is (...)

(which I have never, btw, had to say out loud until today when somebody asked me what the name of my blog is. What should I say? "Dot dot dot"? "Parenthesis dot dot dot? Parenthesis"? I landed on the latter option, but I suppose the correct name for the blog really should be "deletia", because that's the technical term for the excised text in quotations.)

Anyway: works should always be italicised, thusly: Hamlet, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, A Five-Act Play Criticising Tom Stoppard For Being Far Too Clever For His Own Good, etc.

But there is also a typographical rule that says that italicised parentheses should be put in the roman font.

Which is to say not this: (but that was in another country and besides, the wench is dead).

But this: (but that was in another country and besides, the wench is dead)

Clearly there are two conflicting typographical rules here. What to do?

(oh, and here's a completely nauseating, beatifying puff-piece on Clinton written by Alistair Campbell. It turns out that Campbell is not just good at sexing up dossiers that leads one to go to war under false pretenses, he can also sex up the confoundingly, neither-nor career of a president. Anyone who says that any president or national leader is right in everything that they do is just plain wrong, and therefore not your friend. That having been said, I long for the sunnier days of the Clinton presidency.)

Completely unrelated: here is an article I found on an album of music recorded during tuning and between concerts. The cacophonic effect of the orchestra rehearsing separately in the same room is like listening to a flock of birds. Quite beautiful. Here's a sample track where the woodwinds go crazy. Listen for quite atonal readings of "Oh Suzanna" and "Deilig er jorden" (English title?). More clips in the NY Times article. (via Suttonhoo)

29.5.07

Presidential Folli(cl)es

I'm in the surreal, fugue-like state of being up for 36 hours straight, made worse by the anticlimactic release of handing in my MA thesis. Crossing Torgallmenningen in the warm sun, my newborn thesis still actually warm from coming off the printing press, I notice an unusual crowd. A gaggle of journalists up front, and an unusual mixture of people standing behind the barricades: teenagers, pensioners, academics and working class and the occasional punk. I wonder what celebrity could cause the police to carry sub-machineguns. With a little more presence of mind, I might have deduced that this might have something to do with the former President of the United States being in town. I do not. Staring like an idiot, I watch his handlers emerge with golf clubs, stuffing them into the waiting SUVs. Then, small, rodent-like men - his bodyguards - emerge from the hotel and form a perimeter leading up to the car. Finally, like a silverback gorilla stepping into the sunshine of some rainforest clearing, Bill Clinton, wearing an ugly yellow shirt, emerges from the hotel.

The crowd goes wild; cheering, applauding. I'm desperately trying to claw my camera from its holster. He's red-faced and radiant and surely much shorter than Bill Clinton. He waves at the crowd with large, red hands; smiles a huge, electrical smile. He shakes some hands. Stops to speak to the press.

(Later, I will see the interview on TV. It goes a little something like this:

LOCAL NEWS REPORTER:about to shit himselfWhat do you think the big issue is?

While he is talking to the reporters, I finally pop off some shots. They show nothing. I can only barely make out the president's hair. The object of interest is completely unsymbolically obscured by members of the free press. Lowering my camera, knowing I'm not going to get another shot, I start contemplating what it must take to become the kind of person who can step out of a hotel and instantly get an applause.

But eventually, I emerge from my dream-like reverie to a sudden, deep focus on the ex-presidential hairdo. And suddenly I realise what they are all on about, all the people talking about his charisma and his charm. Once you've been in the presence of the former president's hair, you never really forget it. It's like nothing else in the world. Words fail me, but I feel compelled to try:

Despite the silvery tone of mr. Clinton's hair, the impression really is one of warmth and intensity. It never lets you feel like you are getting less than 100% of its attention. It seems completely and overwhelmingly present. The hair is right there. It seems focused and efficient, but nonetheless also friendly. It really is hair that makes you feel like you are at the centre of its universe. It is the dignified hair of a leader, but not the (h)airy, distant kind. Mr. Clinton's hair, instead, gives off a sense of being rooted and connected to the rest of the world. It makes you feel like you've made a connection. It communicates, and gets its point across efficiently. You are never, for instance, in doubt as to the gap in intelligence between mr. Clinton's hairdo and president Bush's head. As it leaves, you have the distinct impression that those silvery waves will never forget you. You will certainly never forget it. It stays with you for the rest of your life, and you are honoured to have been in its stroked-back presence.

Calling a weblog “literary” does not require content that is about literature or even content that aims to be literature. It is not an attempt at categorizing one weblog and its author as more worthwhile in a canonical sense than any other. To the contrary, I propose that every weblog can be considered literary in the sense that it calls attention not only to what we read, but also to the unique way we read it. The weblog is (to paraphrase Colin MacCabe) the performed result of a code of particular techniques, and this paper is an attempt to highlight the primary features of that code. The weblog collapses many of the common assumptions made about texts, as it complicates the distinction between author and audience through the multivocality of both direct commenting, and the reader’s ability to reorder the narrative in myriad ways. Owing to its ongoing creation over an undefined period of time, the weblog becomes a text that constantly expands through the input of both readers and writers. This absence of a discrete, “completed” product makes the weblog as a form resistant to the commoditization either of itself, or of any one particular interpretation.

[T]he best, most thought-provoking blogs are renowned not only for the quality of their writing but for the quality of writing they stimulate in response. (…) and it is in such give-and-take that blogs create the taste by which they are to be enjoyed. (Bérubé, 2006, Rhetorical Occasions: 289)

On a personal note, we've finally decided to leave. I guess I've known we would be leaving for a while now. We discussed it as a family dozens of times. At first, someone would suggest it tentatively because, it was just a preposterous idea- leaving ones home and extended family- leaving ones country- and to what? To where?

24.5.07

6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists—and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental. It must lie outside the world.

6.42 So too it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics. Propositions can express nothing that is higher.

6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)

I never saw this before, but you could actually build most of nonfoundationalist ethics on proposition 6.421.

If I understand Wittgenstein correctly here, he's saying that ethics in order to have meaning or truth-value, they must be transcendental - that is to say outside the world and beyond language.

This is also the first principle of nonfoundationalist ethics. Starting from the idea that God either does not exist or does not reveal Himself in the world to stand as guarantor for a transcendental code of ethics ("6.432 How things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world."), it follows that there is no higher standard to which to hold any action. It follows from this that the rhetorical actions of the public sphere are where all ethics take place. It's all just us judging ourselves, and that's where we need to take our opinions about what should be the cultural standards.

6.52 We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer.

6.521 The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. (Is not this the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted that sense?)

6.522 There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

6.53 The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science—i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy—and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—this method would be the only strictly correct one.

6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

I quoted Wittgenstein in my high-school yearbook. God God, I was pretentious. Glad I'm totally over that phase now.

23.5.07

Software options proliferate extremely easily, too easily in fact, because too many options create tools that can't ever be used intuitively. Intuitive actions confine the detail work to a dedicated part of the brain, leaving the rest of one's mind free to respond with attention and sensitivity to the changing texture of the moment. With tools, we crave intimacy. This appetite for emotional resonance explains why users - when given a choice - prefer deep rapport over endless options. You can't have a relationship with a device whose limits are unknown to you, because without limits it keeps becoming something else.

Indeed, familiarity breeds content. When you use familiar tools, you draw upon a long cultural conversation - a whole shared history of usage - as your backdrop, as the canvas to juxtapose your work. The deeper and more widely shared the conversation, the more subtle its inflections can be.

This is the revenge of traditional media. Even the "weaknesses" or the limits of these tools become part of the vocabulary of culture. I'm thinking of such stuff as Marshall guitar amps and black-and-white film - what was once thought most undesirable about these tools became their cherished trademark.//Brian Eno: @The Revenge of the Intuitive@

Somebody at Apple probably read this one.

On the other hand, a lack of familiarity with the tool can be interesting too. The most interesting moments with any new tool almost always happen in the first couple of weeks, while you\re still discovering its limits. I\m having a period like that //it\s lasted a few months now// trying to learn InDesign and Photoshop, and starting to understand what those tools can do. Or just last week, trying to learn the ropes of Mikkel B\s camera, while shooting pictures of his book launch *which, btw, I should post sometime soon). Looking over the results later, I realised I\d taken a lot of pictures which I thought I would never have taken normally.

I think a lot of people, especially artists, actively pursue that feeling on unfamiliarity with their tools, or try to encourage a mix of familiarity and unfamiliarity. Like tuning your guitar in ways it\s not supposed to be tuned. Like if you change the EADGBE tuning to a CGDF#BF or something, and just play things you\d normally play. Suddenly you get all these crazy sounds that don\t sound anything like what you normally play. Eventually you find some riff that you think sounds cool which you\re certain you\ve never played anything like. And then you sit down and analyse the chords and notes and find out you\re just playing a completely ordinary chord progression you use all the time, you just happen to be playing it using timbres and rhythms you wouldn\t normally play it in.

I think about this now, because I stumbled on the Eno article, and because I\ve suddenly had a lot of tools gone restrictive on me> the guitar in the house only has three working strings, my cell phone charger has gone AWOL and I have no way of getting in touch with anyone, and my keyboard seems to be going through a phase, creating all the @interesting@ punctuation you see here.

Also, I can feel a fit of blogorrhea coming on. I\ve been unable to think out loud for months now. But I can\t write about a presidential hairdo with this crazy keyboard. That demands some dignity.

22.5.07

Ok, so the Zeno joke wasn\t very funny *ancient greek philosophers and references to obscure philosophical paradoxes, as well as inside blog humor_?how could that joke possiblyhave gone wrong__?). Now my keyboard seems to have taken a premature vacation, but I just wanted to stop by to promise that more substantial posting resumes tomorrow, first with a lengthy post concerning Bill Clinton\s hairdo, and to point you towards this gem of the internets {: the aptly named Shorpy. It\s a weblog which posts the most wonderful photographs from before the 1950\s and all the back to the invention of the photograph. It\s almost guaranteed to raise goosebumps every time.

Zeno of Elea, noted Ancient Greek Philosopher, Murdered Near Home

(AP) - Ancient Athens, Ancient Greece.

Noted ancient Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea was found dead by slaves today outside his residence in Ancient Athens. Details of mr. Of Elea's death are still sketchy and unclear, but the city guards have released information indicating that mr. Of Elea had been brutally murdered while attempting to leave his house.

Sources close to the household said that mr. Of Elea had been struck in the chest by several arrows. Ground nearby seemed to hold many turtle tracks. Tortoistic involvement is suspected by city guards.

And as if that wasn't enough to shake my eurocentric view of the universe, it turns out that Michel de Montaigne was not the first essayist, either! Well, I knew that, actually. He just popularised it, and created a really elegant style in it. But I was intrigued by the introduction to this Wikipedia article on Shen Kuo, a Chinese polymath and scholar:

The Dream Pool Essays (Pinyin: Meng Xi Bi Tan; Wade-Giles: Meng Ch'i Pi T'an Chinese: 梦溪笔谈) was an extensive book written by the polymath Chinese scientist and statesman Shen Kuo (1031-1095) by 1088 AD, during the Song Dynasty (960-1279) of China. Although Shen was previously a highly renowned government official and military general, he compiled this enormous written work while virtually isolated on his lavish garden estate near modern-day Zhenjiang, Jiangsu province. He named the book after the name he gave to his estate, the "Dream Brook". The literal translated meaning is Brush Talks from a Dream Brook, and in his biography in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York 1970-1990), Shen Kuo is quoted as saying:

Because I had only my writing brush and ink slab to converse with, I call it Brush Talks.

...Because this is basically the biography of Michel de Montaigne, set in China. Montaigne was a noted statesman and occasional soldier who sort-of-retired from public life to a country estate near Bordeaux (which he was also elected mayor of twice, while being sort-of-retired from public life). He spent his days reading and writing in his tower and occasionally combating the plague in nearby Bordeaux.

Lesson: the Chinese do everything before we do, and get only a fraction of the credit for it.

I live in Oslo, Norway. Where I work as a journalist in the literary supplement to the daily newspaper Klassekampen.

This is my personal blog, which I've kept on and off in one incarnation or another since 2003. I post both in Norwegian and English. If you want to read the blog exclusively in one of these languages, use the links below: